Escape to the Movies: Edge of Darkness
- Thread starter MovieBob
- Start date
Being Mel Gibson's love interest in a movie is a sure-fire way to get killed.
Being his love interest in real life is a sure-fire way to get your teeth knocked out. OH!
Being his love interest in real life is a sure-fire way to get your teeth knocked out. OH!
I had this on my want list for a while just for the fact that Martin Campbell was directing. All of the movies he noted in the "This Is Why Americans Know His Name" segment are all the reasons I was excited about this movie, and about Green Lantern being this, instead of the Mask-like Jack Black farce envisioned a number of years ago.
In other words, it's like watching Memento and Insomnia, then learning Christopher Nolan was taking over Batman.
I actually was expecting this movie, having seen only the "revenge movie" trailers, to be more like Taken, which despite having a stellar lead and an original baddie in underground human trafficking, struck me as being somewhat one-dimensional: girl gets taken, father beats up everyone between him and girl, father rescues girl. Also, not that he's an old guy at this point, but a 56-year-old white-haired Neeson thrashing baddies just seemed a little off to me, like casting Patrick Stewart in Payback.
*** probably some spoilers after this ***
Anyway, what took me by surprise, leaving aside the cookie-cutter military-industrial-complex-as-heavy routine, was that this played more like a heady political thriller. Campbell as always is a master at staging his shots; Orson Welles may be the last person I remember as being SO GOOD at having precisely the right amount of information in a shot, and then placing his actors so that their relative position in all three dimensions is proportional and consequential. The action scenes weren't as prominent as in your typical revenge movie, but the focus on character made the leap to the earthy, raw action sequences more visceral. To that end, Ray Winstone's character, supporting role though he was, turned out to be the lynchpin of the story.
Early in his contribution to the film, Winstone's character Jedburgh likens himself to Diogenes, a leading developer of the philosophy of cynicism. While we tend to use "cynic" interchangeably with "skeptic" as adopting a pessimistic attitude towards good things as well as bad, the original philosophy revolved around exposing the selfish and destructive intentions behind accumulating and holding wealth, fame and power, and shunning those things in favor of a simple, honest life of virtue. He specifically references the story of Diogenes roaming the streets with a lamp in search of an honest man.
Jedburgh also described himself as a consultant of sorts, not someone who acts on the instruction of his employers, but ostensibly someone who makes his own assessments of a situation and acts accordingly, in a manner which I assume has been favorable to those who keep coming back to him for other cleanup jobs. Naturally we follow the lead through a narrative, but there is often a supporting character who is supposed to be seeing an absurd situation through the eyes of an outsider, and therefore, exemplifying the way we would react if we were standing there. In Star Wars it was C-3PO; in Saving Private Ryan it was the translator, Cpl. Upham, and to drive that point home they had a scene where he was literally observing his unit fight a battle, from a distance, through a sniper scope. In this narrative, that moral compass is Jedburgh, who enjoys the delicious irony of also being the source of a lot of political obfuscation in the course of his career.
What we see through the course of the film is how various characters responded to threats to their well-being or to their families, and how characters like Craven and Jedburgh reacted to realizing the certainty of their death. This is why Jedburgh reacts to Craven as he does, having finally found his elusive Honest Man, and the conclusion he makes about Craven's treatment at the hands of his employers.
I guess to sum up, if you watch the film through Craven's eyes, it's an actiony political thriller that goes in fits and starts and has a fairly predictable political corruption angle. If you watch the film through Jedburgh's eyes, it's actually a very clever character piece. It took me two viewings to make the adjustment and really absorb some of the better elements of this movie.
In other words, it's like watching Memento and Insomnia, then learning Christopher Nolan was taking over Batman.
I actually was expecting this movie, having seen only the "revenge movie" trailers, to be more like Taken, which despite having a stellar lead and an original baddie in underground human trafficking, struck me as being somewhat one-dimensional: girl gets taken, father beats up everyone between him and girl, father rescues girl. Also, not that he's an old guy at this point, but a 56-year-old white-haired Neeson thrashing baddies just seemed a little off to me, like casting Patrick Stewart in Payback.
*** probably some spoilers after this ***
Anyway, what took me by surprise, leaving aside the cookie-cutter military-industrial-complex-as-heavy routine, was that this played more like a heady political thriller. Campbell as always is a master at staging his shots; Orson Welles may be the last person I remember as being SO GOOD at having precisely the right amount of information in a shot, and then placing his actors so that their relative position in all three dimensions is proportional and consequential. The action scenes weren't as prominent as in your typical revenge movie, but the focus on character made the leap to the earthy, raw action sequences more visceral. To that end, Ray Winstone's character, supporting role though he was, turned out to be the lynchpin of the story.
Early in his contribution to the film, Winstone's character Jedburgh likens himself to Diogenes, a leading developer of the philosophy of cynicism. While we tend to use "cynic" interchangeably with "skeptic" as adopting a pessimistic attitude towards good things as well as bad, the original philosophy revolved around exposing the selfish and destructive intentions behind accumulating and holding wealth, fame and power, and shunning those things in favor of a simple, honest life of virtue. He specifically references the story of Diogenes roaming the streets with a lamp in search of an honest man.
Jedburgh also described himself as a consultant of sorts, not someone who acts on the instruction of his employers, but ostensibly someone who makes his own assessments of a situation and acts accordingly, in a manner which I assume has been favorable to those who keep coming back to him for other cleanup jobs. Naturally we follow the lead through a narrative, but there is often a supporting character who is supposed to be seeing an absurd situation through the eyes of an outsider, and therefore, exemplifying the way we would react if we were standing there. In Star Wars it was C-3PO; in Saving Private Ryan it was the translator, Cpl. Upham, and to drive that point home they had a scene where he was literally observing his unit fight a battle, from a distance, through a sniper scope. In this narrative, that moral compass is Jedburgh, who enjoys the delicious irony of also being the source of a lot of political obfuscation in the course of his career.
What we see through the course of the film is how various characters responded to threats to their well-being or to their families, and how characters like Craven and Jedburgh reacted to realizing the certainty of their death. This is why Jedburgh reacts to Craven as he does, having finally found his elusive Honest Man, and the conclusion he makes about Craven's treatment at the hands of his employers.
I guess to sum up, if you watch the film through Craven's eyes, it's an actiony political thriller that goes in fits and starts and has a fairly predictable political corruption angle. If you watch the film through Jedburgh's eyes, it's actually a very clever character piece. It took me two viewings to make the adjustment and really absorb some of the better elements of this movie.